Gone But Not Forgotten: S.F.’s Jet Plane Park

Presumably, lead contamination kept all of these children from growing up to visit other San Francisco landmarks that would disappear by the time they would have become adults

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San Francisco has always been a sightseeing city. That’s a given.

But will it always be that way? Sometimes you gotta wonder.

I never get tired of showing outta-town friends around. Any excuse to drive through North Beach like Steve McQueen, get buzzed with a coupla amigos on the Golden Gate Bridge or hang out with the ghost of Al Capone on Alcatraz is a good excuse to me.

I’ll tell you what I am tired of though: What really grinds my gears is whenever I try to take a friend to places from my childhood that NO LONGER EXIST!

A case in point is/was good ol’ Airplane Park on 19th Avenue…

No city skyline, crooked street or view of the bay could ever reach the ooh! and ahh! decibel of a kid poking his head out the station wagon window to catch a glimpse of a giant airplane converted into a playground.

That’s the song my mom would sing whenever me and my sisters drove by it.

While flying through Chronicle archives, I’ve seen conflicting dates for how long the jet was “parked.” The most credible info suggests that the U.S. Navy donated the 1950s era Vought F-8 Crusader to the city’s park and recreation department in 1967. That’s what the info says on the back of the photo above, which Chronicle Librarian Kathleen Rhodes found in our archives.

It was piloted in the imaginations of countless kids until the early ’90s. That’s when the Park and Rec said it could no longer afford the $30-$40K needed to “clean up” the aircraft, according to a 1993 Chronicle story. Apparently the big problem was the high-lead contamination presumed to come from a paint job.

Lead schmed. It’s the same old story.

I have a vague preschool memory of climbing aboard a big-ass Locomotive train and catching the cable car next to it at the Zoo. Those got vamoosed in 1981, or thereabouts. There were at least two other jet playgrounds in the area – including one somewhere in the Bayview and one near Los Gatos, I believe. Hmmm. Wonder what could have happend to those?

In snooping around during work for other stories I had asked a few park and rec folks whatever became of the plane of fame. One person said it was rotting away in storage for years. More recently, another Parks and rec representative said it was probably sent back to the Navy many years ago and most likely crushed to little pieces of scrap metal.

“People were real bummed when we took that thing away,” said Rose Dennis of the Parks and Rec department. We still get people asking: ‘where the hell is the plane?’ We had to take it away due to toxicity issue. I remember many a good day when I piloted that thing. Maybe that’s why I’m a little crazy.”

NEWSFLASH

According to another last-second Google search (thanks a lot Chronice “Archives”), The Larsen Park Plane is not flying around in the after-life playground in the sky. The Crusader was beautifully restored and became the “nucleus” of the growing fleet at the Pacific Coast Air Museum in Santa Rosa.

“We have it here right here,” says Duane at the Museum, who welcomes all to salute the Larsen Park Plane again. However, climbing aboard is no longer an option – in part because of the fragments of lead paint inside, but also in order to keep it preserved. “The shell is great shape but the cockpit and interior were pretty well trashed out.”

Technically, the jet is still property of the National Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola, Florida. But it should stay in the Bay Area for many more years to come. To see more photos of the phenomenal restoration work by Captain Don Doherty and his Crusader ressurection team…Click here.